Jerry J. Min

Do governments discriminate against foreign-owned firms in enforcing regulations? Politicians may favor domestic-owned firms through relaxed enforcement. Yet foreign-owned firms can face discrimination even under politicians who are not protectionist and value stringent regulation: an information-driven bias by bureaucratic regulators. Pro-regulatory politicians task bureaucrats with enforcement, which requires detecting violations that are not perfectly observable. External ownership—foreign or domestic non-local—may signal less familiarity with local regulations and greater violation risk, especially where politicians have promoted stringent rules. Regulators therefore target externally owned firms for additional scrutiny, such as inspections. I examine U.S. environmental regulation, where states can adopt stricter standards and conduct most enforcement. I link administrative records of scrutiny and penalties to ownership data covering 2.4 million plants since 1989. Scrutiny rises after plants are taken over by foreign owners while remaining unchanged after in-state takeovers. This reaction reflects information-driven discrimination rather than protectionism. It extends to domestic out-of-state takeovers. It is concentrated in Democratic strongholds, where pro-regulatory politicians have promoted stringent state-specific regulations. Penalty decisions show no comparable ownership bias but favor campaign donors. Information-driven bias within the bureaucracy, not protectionism, drives discrimination against foreign investors.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) and migrant workers earn income abroad that both home and host states can tax. To avoid double taxation, countries have signed over 4,500 bilateral tax treaties (BTTs). BTTs limit the host state’s taxing right on each overlapping tax base and allow the home state to tax the remainder. Many argue that BTTs increasingly restrict host taxing rights, undermining developing countries’ ability to tax MNCs and facilitating tax evasion. When and why do states accept lower host taxing rights? I argue that democracies and left-wing governments selectively concede host taxing rights to attract foreign firms’ business and investment. I construct the first global dataset of BTT contents, coding 20 provisions in over 4,000 treaties to quantify these rights across tax bases. I find that democracies across the ideological spectrum, as well as left-wing nondemocracies, grant lower host taxing rights—but only on incomes and payments generated exclusively by foreign firms, not on other bases such as foreign individuals’ income or domestic firms’ outgoing payments. The rise of global tax evasion reflects uneven government preferences, not merely uniform pressures from the treaty regime, and the left’s conventional preference for domestic taxation does not extend to global taxation.

Nationalism is a popular explanation for opposition to globalization, yet existing studies overlook its multifaceted nature. I argue that two distinct nationalist predispositions, national chauvinism and national pride, have contrasting effects on globalization preferences. National chauvinism drives opposition to globalization, whereas national pride fosters support for globalization, because they shape how individuals interpret information about globalization in different ways. I examine all known public opinion surveys that allow for the measurement of these two predispositions and globalization preferences, covering 46 developed and developing countries from 1994 to 2025. I show that individuals high in national pride but low in chauvinism are consistently more supportive of trade, inward foreign direct investment, immigration, and international organizations. Original surveys provide additional evidence for the informational mechanisms.